Sun, 23 Sep 2007

Last April
I discovered the manifesto
for CCTV filmmakers, a proposal for a creative use of the
Data Protection Act. I still haven't seen the movie Faceless.
The DVD is not yet available but an excerpt
and the trailer
are on YouTube. Manu Luksch and Mukul Patel, the filmmakers, published
their first-hand experience of the Data Protection Act in a very
interesting essay titled Faceless:
chasing the data shadow. This short essay (11 pages) runs
through the many different types of replies they received to their
subject access requests made under the Data Protection Act. It explains
the general confusion of many data controllers, how so many CCTV
systems are not functional and why the process of obtaining images
became much more difficult from 2004.

Sound editor Walter Murch, in an interview
published on BldBlog briefly mentions a different work also done one
the principle of the manifesto for CCTV filmmakers:

Murch: Well, there was a short film made a few years
ago where the
filmmaker had worked out the location of all the surveillance cameras
along a cross-section of London, and how many of those cameras were
operated by the municipal authorities. If the cameras were operated by
the city, then he could get access to the footage. So he mapped out a
pedestrian trip for himself across town knowing that, at every moment
he would be on CCTV: as soon as he was out of range of one camera, he
would come into focus on another. So he walked the walk, wrote to all
the relevant authorities, got the footage, and then edited it all
together into a continuous narrative. It’s very amusing in a dystopian,
Warholian kind of way. You only “get” the joke after a few minutes of
watching.

But George Lucas’s THX-1138
was kind of like that, except it was made in 1971. Much of the action
takes place on video surveillance cameras. In fact, the job of the girl
in the film is to monitor banks of surveillance cameras. She eventually
gets fed up, stops taking her Prozac, or whatever, and tries to escape
this completely video-monitored world – which, it turns out, is
completely underground because of some disaster that had happened on
the surface many years earlier.

As for the efficacy of cameras making us more secure, This
is
London just reminded us that ‘a comparison of the number of
cameras in
each London borough with the proportion of crimes solved there found
that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with
hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.’

Vague spectres of menace caught on time-coded
surveillance cameras
justify an entire network of peeping vulture lenses. A web of
indifferent watching devices, sweeping every street, every building, to
eliminate the possibility of a past tense, the freedom to forget. There
can be no highlights, no special moments: a discreet tyranny of “now”
has been established. “Real time” in its most pedantic form.